Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (1882-1945) was born in Hyde Park, New York on January 30, 1882, the son of James Roosevelt and Sara Delano Roosevelt. His parents and private tutors provided him with almost all his formative education. He attended Groton (1896-1900), a prestigious preparatory school in Massachusetts, and received a B.A. degree in history from Harvard in only three years (1900-03). Roosevelt next studied law at New York's Columbia University. When he passed the bar examination in 1907, he left school without taking a degree. For the next three years he practiced law with a prominent New York City law firm. He entered politics in 1910 and was elected to the New York State Senate as a Democrat from his traditionally Republican home district.

In the meantime, in 1905, he had married a distant cousin, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, who was the niece of President Theodore Roosevelt. The couple had six children, five of whom survived infancy: Anna (1906), James (1907), Elliott (1910), Franklin, Jr. (1914) and John (1916).

Roosevelt was reelected to the State Senate in 1912, and supported Woodrow Wilson's candidacy at the Democratic National Convention. As a reward for his support, Wilson appointed him Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1913, a position he held until 1920. He was an energetic and efficient administrator, specializing in the business side of naval administration. This experience prepared him for his future role as Commander-in-Chief during World War II. Roosevelt's popularity and success in naval affairs resulted in his being nominated for vice-president by the Democratic Party in 1920 on a ticket headed by James M. Cox of Ohio. However, popular sentiment against Wilson's plan for U.S. participation in the League of Nations propelled Republican Warren Harding into the presidency, and Roosevelt returned to private life.

While vacationing at Campobello Island, New Brunswick in the summer of 1921, Roosevelt contracted poliomyelitis (infantile paralysis). Despite courageous efforts to overcome his crippling illness, he never regained the use of his legs. In time, he established a foundation at Warm Springs, Georgia to help other polio victims, and inspired, as well as directed, the March of Dimes program that eventually funded an effective vaccine.

With the encouragement and help of his wife, Eleanor, and political confidant, Louis Howe, Roosevelt resumed his political career. In 1924 he nominated Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York for president at the Democratic National Convention, but Smith lost the nomination to John W. Davis. In 1928 Smith became the Democratic candidate for president and arranged for Roosevelt's nomination to succeed him as governor of New York. Smith lost the election to Herbert Hoover; but Roosevelt was elected governor.

In the late 1930s, spurred by Adolf Hitler's aggression in Europe and Japanese expansionism in the Pacific, Franklin Delano Roosevelt moved the United States back toward engagement in world affairs. He was restrained, however, by the persistence of strong isolationist sentiment among the voters and by congressional passage of a series of neutrality laws intended to prevent American involvement in a second world war. Roosevelt won the contest when, alarmed by Germany's defeat of France in 1940, Congress passed his lend-lease legislation to help Great Britain's continued resistance to the Germans. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, brought the United States into the war on the side of Britain and the Soviet Union.

Roosevelt framed his diplomatic objectives as wartime leader in a series of wartime conferences. In collaboration with Winston Churchill he explained Anglo-American war aims in August 1941 in the form of the Atlantic Charter. It denied territorial ambitions, favored self-government and liberal international trade arrangements, and pledged freedom from want and permanent security against aggression. At Casablanca, Morocco, in January 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill insisted on Germany's unconditional surrender as a means of preventing the enemy's future military resurgence. The Quebec Conference (August 1943) planned the Normandy invasion. At Moscow (October 1943) the Allied foreign ministers approved in principle a postwar organization for world security. Military strategy and the problem of postwar Germany came under discussion at Tehran (Teheran) (November-December 1943) and Québec (September 1944). Finally, at Yalta in the USSR (February 1945), Roosevelt, Churchill, and Joseph Stalin broached their plans for a postwar world. In the process, Roosevelt pressed for admission of China to the Allied councils as a major power, liberalization of international trade as a means of preventing future wars, and creation of a United Nations organization as a mechanism for preserving peace. He did not, however, see the end of the war. Franklin died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945.

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